


The gun is empty, my heart's fully loaded (or maybe it's the other way around)

by watername



Category: 2NE1, Big Bang (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-27
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-07-18 12:57:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7316029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watername/pseuds/watername
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All he can concentrate on is her smile and how if it were a fist he’d let himself get bruised. (bank robbers AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a WIP I didn't want to sit on anymore. Curse you, impatience!

The first time they meet, she holds a gun to his head.

Jiyong doesn't take it personally.

Instead, he keeps his eyes down and his shoulders slumped. He bites at his lower lip, watching her draw all the attention leveled at this scene, letting her look over the spectators lazily. He pulls the drawer open with an obnoxious jangle that makes her eyeline snap back at him.

When he presses the bundle of money towards her, he meets her eyes for the first time and memorizes the delicate wings of her eyeliner, the firetruck red of her lipstick that will be rendered in stark black and white by the sketch artist.

He rustles the bills unnecessarily loudly as he stuffs them into the purse she holds wide open. His lips open before he can stop them, the myriad ways ‘he would have done it’ that’s been stacked on the back of his tongue since she walked in.

“Sloppy,” he says, quiet and without venom, puffing his assessment into the sliver of air between their bodies.

A fuse lights behind her eyes that illuminates all the minuscule cracks in his mask for her to see: he holds his hands too steady, he holds his gaze without bravado or bluster. He is perfectly deferent to her demands and it keeps her audience under control.

When he dumps the last of money in, the bag is snapped shut; when he pulls his hand back, the curve of her lips is a car crash waiting to happen.

“Watch this,” she murmurs, and then she screams – _le flic!_

He hears one of the cashiers cry out as she raises the gun high and brings the butt down hard on his head, knocking him out.

When he wakes up, there's an officer ready with questions, asking why the thief thought he was police. He sits at the back of the ambulance for 80 minutes. At the end of it the cop's notepad holds the biography of his cover identity, and his entire reconnaissance is flushed down the drain.

That, he takes personally.

* * *

 

The first time he hears her name, he's opening a safety deposit box for her. There's no muzzle pressed against his scalp; she's tucked it against the small of her back, the barrel outlined in the tight grip of her designer jeans. When he hands over the box, her rings clink against the steel.

She picked him out of the line-up of tellers without hesitation, grabbing him by the back of his neatly pressed jacket and marching him into the back of the bank as he gritted his teeth.

As soon as they turned into the quiet, secluded room, she released him, tucked the gun away, and looked him up and down, her face a gallery of disappointment at what she saw: his hair, flattened and neatened, with a thick-toothed comb and cheap gel; his glasses, frameless, thin, and useless; his tie, pulled just tight enough to be respectable, but not notable. She reached out and worked deftly to pull the knot loose. She ran long, crystal-blue fingernails through his hair until it mussed to her satisfaction; she trailed down and plucked the glasses off the bridge of his nose.

When he hands over the box, she bends over it; the frames nestle on top of her messy, bleached-blonde hair. He picks out the black threads of her roots.

"Lee Chaerin," she says, off-hand, her speech a heavy cadence of French, as she picks out a gaudy necklace and tucks it into the deep pocket of her coat. There are a few dusty papers beneath it that Jiyong knows are worth millions - they were his intended target.

She rips them in two.

"Near-sighted?" she casually asks, reminding him at the same time, as she spins on her heel to walk back up to the bank floor. He fights down an impetuous temptation to sprint up after her, rip the gun from her hands, and get _something_ instead of walking away empty-handed again. Instead, he trails behind her, lets his head hang low and docile. He trips twice and keeps his eyes in a squint the rest of the robbery, even as she blows a kiss goodbye.

He goes back to his hotel with a headache three hours later.

* * *

He decides their next meeting will be on his terms. He jumps to a small town and rides out an unused alias in an attempt to flush her out. He could use the name she gave him and make a phone call or two, but it feels too intimate a matter to bid it out to a third party, this small back-and-forth. He hunkers down in a bank not even worth robbing, but gives it as much as he ever would. He doesn’t believe in giving anything less than perfection, even for a ruse.

He goes three months without seeing her, living off of standard pay and sketching out plans he’ll never use, and gives it up as a lost cause. He turns in his notice to his manager, who expresses disappointment, and waves off her questions with pleasantly vague noises about it not working out. She wishes him the best of luck.

He wraps up that identity in an unmarked suitcase and stows it in the overhead luggage the next morning.

* * *

When they meet the third time, he decides that Lee Chaerin’s mission in life is that he never makes a decent payday again. She pulls him aside before he even makes it to the employee entrance to the bank, and puts a finger to his lips. He's tempted to bite it off.

She arches her eyebrow at the expression on his face, his palpable frustration, and leans in close, close enough that he can see one of her contact is out of place, a crescent moon of blue failing to hide dark brown. 

Even her perfume is loud and overwhelming, designed to hold people down in its scent and punch them into submission. He hates it, how it clings to him and ruins all of his work to be unobtrusive as possible.

"I think you can do better," she says, perfect, unaccented. She flicks open the collar of his suit jacket and finds the shirt crease he carefully made that morning using a thrift store iron.

He scoffs.

She punches his shoulder, hard, before turning on four-inch heels and walking into the bank. She leaves the indent of a ring for him to rub a thumb over later.

He watches news of the robbery from the next town over, his coffee growing cold in front of him as he fixates, unhealthily.

* * *

The best defense, he decides once he drains the coffee, is not playing the game at all.

He pulls out the oldest of aliases and settles in, plugging away at a company where no one knows what they do, and no one cares. His paychecks are small and regular, and he hates it, but not as much as he hates being one-upped. Long plays are his specialty, and it only takes five months for her to appear again, sliding into the chair across from him as he eats a late dinner from an empty restaurant.

"I didn't think you'd just give up," she says without preamble. He raises an eyebrow at her and takes a sip of his water. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and she wears plain make-up.  He looks at her and thinks, _disguise._

"Who says I'm giving up?" he asks back.

"I am.”

She’s right and she makes him want to pull a gun on the 19-year-old cashier, just to prove that he can, and there's the sign he needs to get out now, before he either falls in love or gets thrown into prison.

She glances over at the front counter and closes her hand over his.

"Did you figure it out?"

"What?" he asks, stupidly, watching how her eyes crinkle under the single lightbulb.

"What you did wrong."

 He bristles and snaps out of it, snatches his hand back from where it's burning at the fire of her touch. She sits back and crosses her arms, looks at him evenly beneath the obtuse angle of her eyebrows. 

"So that's a no."

She stands up and throws down a piece of paper, digits scrawled across it.

"Call me when you figure it out."

* * *

The last time someone told her no, she's 18 and sitting in the back of a getaway van. Her hand was held out for a weapon, her heart was racing with anticipation. Her partner told her he was the only one going in. He told her to stay in the car, that there was no need to risk damaging the bait. He had a curve to his lips and chuckled at the thought of her taking action as his equal. She laughed with him.

 _Bait_ , she considered as she slid into the driver's seat and pulled into traffic, was just another word for _worm._

Chaerin was not something squeezing its way through dirt, waiting to be plucked out - to be eaten, to be pierced through and through for someone else's lazy weekend leisure. She drove west for hours, and chased the sun as it tried to hide behind the horizon.

An old, barren coffee shop huddled at the foot of dry hill had no newspapers; she pulled out her phone and saw the header:

BANK ROBBER IN CUSTODY AFTER 5-HOUR STANDOFF; HOSTAGES RELEASED SAFELY.

She read it to the conclusion, raised her eyebrows in scorn at the few quotations that sounded like bad dramatics. She laughed out loud, clapped her hand over her mouth as the noise floated behind the dusty counter. The photo captured the expression of Yang Hyunsuk's face carved with lines of shock, uncertainty, fear. She thought he looked just like a worm gazing up at a beak.

But - even a worm would fight to survive, however uselessly, and she drove two hours north to the next rest stop. The slow sunrise dripped against the clouded window, and her breath puffed out visible in front of her. She spread the dye through her hair, practiced, smooth. She scrubbed her face until it was bare and plain. She burned her clothes and dumped the ashes into the working toilets, flushed them over and over again until there's nothing left.

She drove to the ocean in sweatpants, her hair pulled back tight and painful. She sang along with the radio and pictured her future victorious.

* * *

 

For no reason he wants to dwell on, he keeps it, tucking it into a frayed pocket of distressed jeans, nestling it behind crisp pocket squares interchangeably, a consistent fold against his heart. He carefully zips it into briefcases, backpacks, satchels.

He clicks away at the antiquated computer evenly when his co-worker calls him by his name, this month, asking him if he speaks French.

He crinkles his brow in polite decline, but his co-worker is already waving someone over to his booth.

In perfect French she says as she leans against his counter, “Withdrawal?”

He breathes in deep and shifts as though he can stop her voice from being a spark against the flint of his heart. He is ever-mindful of the eyes and ears besides their own, but even that thought betrays him, thinking of _theirs_ instead of _his._

“Account number?” he says in nasal, accented French.

She rattles off a phone number he hasn’t used in years, and he shakes his head, tamping down a smirk.

“This one, then,” she says smoothly and then gives him the number he only adopted this morning, in anticipation of moving on. It is virgin and unused, and she already has her fingerprints all over it.

Before he can respond, she slides over a deposit slip, inviting him to flip it over with a slight raise of her eyebrow.

“ _Ceci est un vol_ _,”_ it reads, and she is _stupid_ , **_stupid_** for doing this here, now, when there’s a fresh guard, and the safe is on a timer, and he suddenly realizes he’s grown accustomed to her ruining his plans, but all of this offended feeling is about her, how she’s doing this **_all wrong_** and she’s going to get shot, arrested, and his impending life looks like it’s been drained. He can feel the other tellers looking at him, at the corded silence between him and her, but all he can concentrate on is her smile and how if it were a fist he’d let himself get bruised.

Beneath his fingers he feels another paper grain, and he looks down at the swirling cursive reading “ _C'est un sketch.”_

One of the tellers starts to walk over, and he crumples both notes in his hands as he turns sharply to greet her.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her walk around the columns, the pinkie and thumb extended, spurring him on to join the game.

* * *

 

His phone rings before he can bring himself to dial in the late night.

“Don’t bother coming in. There’s nothing left.”

She leaves the silence between them to draw out, willing him to respond, but he only has enough courage to hang up and pretend this is still up to him, that he still has a say in what happens next. He hangs his head and forces himself to calculate the cost of her presence in his life.

“Oh,” he breathes into the room, and he fumbles at the phone again, pulls the folded note out of his pocket and prepares to freefall, but the escalated trot of his heartbeat slows and crumbles as it hears only _This phone number has been disconnected._

* * *

The first and only time Chaerin was even close to caught, she wore a mask like they all told her to, pulled down low and thick over her face.

 _Basics,_ Yang Hyunsuk said. _Never let them get a good look at you_.

She realized how stupid this was as she limped to her car, sloppily applying pressure to the shallow canyon the bullet carved into her jeans, thigh. She took advice from a man slowly rotting in prison.

She wrapped up her wound in a parking lot beneath stained, plain fingernails, half-naked with a shotgun laid beside her. She needed to be better, and she _would_ , swore it with obscenities beneath halogen and smog, blood in the lines of her palm and gunpowder in her hair.

The next day she slid in front of the public computer and spends hours studying the steady hands, the careful precision of movements, the end result. She politely acceded to the requests for her to move, spoken and unspoken, when she looked for too long; if they asked in the afternoon, she took long walks and came back in after the sun had gone down and shifts had changed. If they asked in the evening, she went back to the hotel and practiced.

She spent a week like this and then slowly, meticulously gathered supplies from unattended purses left on bathroom counters, at the side of coffee tables, slung over the back of cushioned chairs.

In the hotel, beneath flickering fluorescence, looking into a mirror with rusted hinges, she held her right hand steady with her left, as she applied the foundation, concealer, lipstick, mascara. She washed off her face, over and over again, and re-made it until no one would recognize her as the girl who failed.

When she walked into the police station, and submitted herself as an official witness to her own failure, she held her breath as the officers studied her face, as they covertly traced the length of her bared legs beneath the frayed edge of her skirt, and released it when they let her walk out with their thanks for her public service.

She laughed as she climbed into the car, threw her purse so that it covered the dark red of the blood stain on the passengers seat, and pressed her heel to the gas pedal.


	2. Chapter 2

When she first started down this road on her own, a one-off contact told her to look at everyone with suspicion, because you never knew who was an anonymous lead. It was good advice, and, when their clumsy, thick fingers touched the bare skin of her hip, she thanked them for it with a bullet to the temple.

 

Chaerin is reckless and wild, prone to fits of caprice - this is what Jiyong knows.

* * *

 

After she left him behind - after taking his useless glasses and making him blind - he should have stayed in the rearview mirror with everything else; but, when she peered over her sunglasses, he followed, a mirage pressing against the glass of her eyes at each and every town. Chaerin had planned to stop, but her heart demanded more.

 

She imagined how his face would look when she dogged him; it warmed her when cold wind whipped against her face on empty highways.

 

When it came to life, it burned, like her bare skin had been grated against gravel. She challenged him to do better than perfection, and he scoffed. The sound captured how he knew he was good, but _who was she to say that to him?_

 

Her fist curled into a ball that was driven into his shoulder. The ring cut open her finger as he winced.

 

It turned out she liked that look better.

* * *

 

He could have called it strategic, he could have called it smart, he could have called it anything, but when five months went by with nothing, she knew a coward when she saw one.  She threw an ultimatum, a lit fuse. He could have thought the phone number was fake, or, worse, real, but neither stopped him from brushing it carefully with the tips of his fingers as she left.

 

Chaerin does not hide. She gives her name and phone number away to dangerous criminals who bear grudges against her; she walks into police stations and looks into security cameras; she knows that when she’s caught she will be caught as Lee Chaerin for all of Lee Chaerin’s crimes.

  

The worst thing Kwon Jiyong has done, in Kwon Jiyong’s name, is a traffic ticket, paid promptly and without commotion when he was 17.  She wants to split him open when she sees that’s all he has ever owned. She wants to crowbar open his mouth and feed him the long, long list of his deeds as an emetic and make him vomit up all of his lies.

 

* * *

 

 

Here they were: her looking at him, at how  _predictable_ , how  _neat_ , how  _organized_  he was, standing there – so slick in infiltration he couldn't pick himself out of a crowd. If he wanted to be normal, she gave it to him as a gift, perfumed in a heady mix of panic, fear, and anxiety that would blotch his face like an allergy.

 

She deliberately chose the worst time for a robbery, the exact nadir of success. It would be an inevitable hail of bullets – the security guard who was too gun-happy; the manager too close to the panic button; the wrong mixture of tellers who would be emboldened by the adrenaline, not paralyzed; and all for a measly amount of cash. It was a perfect storm of bad decisions.

 

She would drag him into the middle of it with her, tied forever to a failure, if he wouldn’t claim his successes.

 

He looked at her, the panic and fear in his eyes reaching out at her greedily, and she felt like a riptide was dragging her out to sea. She pulled at the second note she had written, frantic fingers rifling through her pocket for an afterthought, a contingency:

 

_C'est un sketch._

 

His shoulders slumped down, his hands bent around the papers, and she wanted to run, further and faster and harder than she ever had before, until there were miles of false identities between them – but he looked at her, and it was like watching a foreign language bloom into familiar characters, to recognize it as relief and longing on an imperfect face.

 

She could not stop herself. She had given him a lit fuse, once, and she wanted to see it detonate – but it instead sputtered:

 

_“There’s nothing left.”_

And then she ran, turned a coward by his cowardice.

  

And – this is what Jiyong will find out – Chaerin is cruel.

* * *

 

Six months later, of morning silences and empty passenger seats, her hands are stained black with dye and she donates all the unopened perfumes scattered on the hotel sink to charity; folds away the clothes she likes the best into the bottom drawer. She bows her head and signs a lease in small delicate letters and looks around with sharp, intelligent eyes as the manager gives her the key.

 

The next morning, she squares her shoulders and reaches behind her. The scissors echo quietly as her hair falls to the floor and leaves her naked shoulder blades exposed. The computer she has open shows a young woman in her twenties, innocent and beaming, and Chaerin experiments in the mirror.

 

When she shows up for work – when her smile is soft and pretty and harmless – Jiyong’s jaw drops, sharp and ugly.

 

It's not a large bank, or a small one, but she can see why he's making his nest here. There's complacence written in the manager's walk, and a certain resignation leaking from the watery eyes of the lead teller, but that won't change between today and a month from now, when Jiyong plans, like clockwork, to walk away.

 

Chaerin thinks - _fuck waiting_ \- as she uses her trigger finger to rifle through the employee handbook with politesse.

 

 _Fuck waiting_ \- she wants to scream by the end of the week, when the security guard holds the door open for her as the rain beats at her back.

 

 _Fuck waiting_ \- she says before she sleeps beneath low-grade sheets, but the words falter when she pictures Jiyong, how in each day his lips are thin and white and there is gossip already about how he's been so cold to her, the new girl who hasn't been anything but professional to him.

 

So - she wakes up and walks up and offers him coffee and counts down.

 

So – he looks between her and the clock and the calendar, and she gives him cataracts from paranoia.

 

So – there are other eyes seeing him seeing her, brittle and sharp and **_noticeable._**

So _\- fuck waiting_ , but waiting is worth it when he splinters as their fingers graze.

* * *

 

At 18, Jiyong tweaked every aspect of himself methodically, until the person who boarded the empty morning bus wasn’t the person on the missing posters.

 

After two weeks, he knocks on the window of her car in a one-two pattern, where it’s sitting on the street in front of her apartment. It’s an hour before the bank opens, thirty minutes before she’s supposed to be there, and his restraint is something to be admired. She rolls it down hesitantly and bites her lip, innocent and nervous. There is a security camera pointed directly at them.

 

“What are you doing?” he asks.

 

“Going to work,” she says, and there are circles around his eyes as he takes in her appearance, looking for something to find lacking. She hears his fingernail tapping against the roof of the car. “Do you need a ride?”

 

“You’re not an employee,” he says, flat, factual.

 

“My paycheck disagrees,” she says. She tugs on the door handle and then throws it open, sharp, before pulling it shut again. The same moment he gasps from pain, his hand closes between the frame and the roof of the car, and he leans his body against it. “Same rate as you. Or are you not an employee either?”

 

There’s a security guard watching them from across the street, a drug store cowboy looking to be a hero, and he’s already taken out his half-smoked cigarette between dry lips and he’s crushing it beneath his shoe. Chaerin has a gun in her glovebox, and a smile on her lips.

 

“What’s your game?”

 

“You,” she crosses her arms and hangs half out the window, looking up at him through eyelashes. She grins, sharp and serrated. “It didn’t have to be so one-sided. But you didn’t want to play, remember?”

 

His face colors at that, like a passing cloud, before he stiffens and steps back. She could reach out for him, wrap her fingers around his belt loops, but she instead interlaces them and rests her chin. No rings rub against the soft skin of her throat, and she misses the weight of them on her fingers as she drives.

 

“Walk away,” he says and turns, and she throws a worried look at the security guard and beckons him to come over.

 

* * *

 

Chaerin comes into work weeping, and tells her motherly co-worker that one of the other employees followed her home. The other woman begs her to say who.

 

She blows her nose and shakes her head, and before she leaves for the day she sees her duck into the manager’s office and close the door. When she walks past Jiyong’s station she scrawls _XOXO_ on his notepad and tucks a photo of herself into the corner of his monitor.

 

There’s a staff meeting the next morning, and she makes a point to hesitate at the doorway and find where Jiyong is sitting before choosing her seat, as far from him as possible.

 

* * *

 

 

Whispers grow.

 

* * *

 

Jiyong spent his twenty-second birthday in a hospital, unconscious, with a name that wasn’t his on the patient chart. He spent the day after forging signatures, tentatively feeling the foreign, clean buzz of his hair, forcing his fingers to memorize the path of the scar there. When he went to bed, he thought _an inch to the left and..._.

 

He denied the path that the _and…_ pointed towards. He moved on and, when his hair grew back, uneven, his face twisted only for a moment before he focused on how he could hide it best. He never considered using it.

 

* * *

 

 

Jiyong is fired by a disgruntled middle manager who looks at him from behind smudged glasses that slip periodically down the sweat-slick bridge of his nose. Chaerin gnaws on her fingernail from the first stall in the bathroom, twisting her feet on the point of her toes.  The bathroom is right next to the manager’s office, and the walls were put up too thin. Jiyong’s voice is soft and polite up until it’s exposed, cut in half by the man’s emotional accusation that names everything but _Chaerin_.

 

She thinks of the man’s beloved daughter, who puts up photos of herself on the internet, who unwittingly leased the outline of her identity.

 

(It’s uncanny to the manager - her hair is just like Chaerin’s; her smile is just like Chaerin’s.)

 

She counts – one, two, three, four – and pushes open the door to the hallway just as Jiyong passes in front, the manager watching from the doorway. She ducks her head, her hair making a curtain of privacy, and smiles salt into the wound. His step half-stutters before his gaze flickers behind her, and he balls up his hand into a fist and rubs it into his eyes as if he could make her disappear. When he opens it again, she’s sniffling into her sleeve down the hall, her shoulders shaking.

 

Her victory is unidentifiable as a victory. She thinks he would like that.


	3. Chapter 3

Jiyong hasn't handled a gun in a long time, but it's just like riding a bike. 

   

* * *

 

Chaerin comes back to her modest, neat apartment and frays the edges of her make-believe life.

 

She does the quiet things first, taking the clothes out from the dresser and throwing them haphazardly. Her clothes land softly around the room, like snowfall, and she takes a moment to appreciate how the lining on the skirt catches the setting sun just right. She leaves the drawers open, one half-yanked off its rails. She moves on, goes the closet, where she easily balances on her toes to reach the top shelf, and retrieves the exit necessities. She pulls out a switchblade and moves to the front door, stabs it into the wall and slashes. The paint flakes land on her bare feet, settle between her toes as she finishes jaggedly writing the word, made uglier in the half-light.

 

Her computer collides satisfyingly against the sharp corner of the kitchen counter, and it's only twice more before there's plastic scattered across the linoleum.

 

The bathroom holds a line-up of unused products, and she carries all of them to her dresser in her small hands before replacing them neatly upright. She then sweeps her arm in one angry, urgent motion. They go flying, some landing on the floor, and one perfume bottle shatters against the wall in a particularly cinematic explosion.

 

There's a tentative knock at the door, and Chaerin closes her eyes, presses her index fingers at the corners, and rubs steadily as the knocks trail down, until the last one is hardly audible.

 

When she opens the door, it's only enough for her neighbor, already half-turned to leave, to see the width of her face and the puffiness of her eyes. She closes it immediately as their face breaks into a portrait of unease and anxiety.

 

* * *

 

 

Hours later, she dresses herself in an over-large sweatshirt and walks towards the building exit. There's a thump against the last door in the hallway as she passes, the weight of her neighbor pressed against it. She turns her head away and pulls the hood tight, hiding her face from the narrow, distorted view of the peephole.

 

It's a beautiful night, clear and crisp, and she walks to the drug store across the street, her footsteps weighted down. The security guard looks twice when she enters.

 

She buys a sewing needle, thread, a small brown bottle of antibiotic, and doesn't look at the cashier, a woman of 40 whose hand shakes when she scans the bottle. Chaerin asks for cigarettes in a small, timid voice, and stutters her thanks when their fingers brush against each other. When she goes outside, she pulls out an empty lighter and slides her thumb against it.

 

"Here, let me help," her hero offers, his tan fingers holding out a light.

 

"Thanks," she mumbles, leaning in. His eyes take in her disheveled hair, the smears of black, dark as an oil slick, at the corners of her eyes.

 

They smoke in silence, and she counts beats as they watch the cars pass by.

 

"You remember me?" she asks.

 

The security guard ducks his head, kicks his foot against the blacktop, and nods, ashamed.

 

"I thought...you didn't call them," she says, shy, and her reliance on him is stronger than any magnet at pulling him in.

 

He shuffles and Chaerin turns her cheek, lets the artificial light from the store catch the redness of her eyes. He flushes and swears, "I will, okay? I will, but you have to tell them everything."

 

She nods, solemn and earnest, "I will," and reaches out to wrap her hand in his. He stills, sudden, squeezing softly so as not to break her.

  

* * *

 

 

When the police knock on her door the next morning, she stands aside, docile, as they take photos and murmur amongst themselves. She asks about how safe she'll be tonight, and they recommend staying with friends.

 

She's new in town, Chaerin explains, and doesn't know anyone well enough. They can only see themselves as inadequate when she says she'll find a hotel for now.

 

* * *

 

 

Her drugstore cowboy offers her a ride to the hotel, and any other help. She accepts and slides into his secondhand car, fiddles with the seatbelt until he reaches over and pushes it in for her. He flicks through the radio and glances at her with every station, gauging and solicitous and kind. When they arrive at the hotel, he hops out and opens the door for her.

 

His fingers fiddle against each other, nerves and worry, as she presses the button for the elevator.

 

"Thanks," she says, quickly, and stands on her toes to kiss his cheek.

 

He nods at her, the color high in his face, as the elevator doors close.

 

When they open, Jiyong is waiting for her.

 

* * *

 

 

"Are you done yet?" His words miss the target as she turns with an eyeroll, and instead settle for snapping at her heels as she heads down the hallway. The gun is an unfamiliar, rash weight at his side that unsettles his stride as he follows her down an aisle of dusty light fixtures and half-off artwork.

 

"Aren't you?" she snarls. 

 

He snorts as she viciously stabs the key in the lock, her hair peeking out from behind a faded hoodie that smells like cigarettes and cologne. It would be the easiest thing to end it - end _this_ , whatever it was - now. There's a fire exit 10 feet away, and the hotel never bothered to replace the security cameras. He has a hundred names just as fake, just as effective, as the one he uses now, and they can make up any story they want for this one because it won't matter. He'll be someone else tomorrow, someone to whom the name Lee Chaerin means nothing. He wishes, vaguely, that he could have been that person 10 months ago. 

 

She shoves the door open with her shoulder and his hand flutters away from the pocket and lands on the doorframe, still marginally warm from her body. 

 

He teeters on the threshold and simply watches her as she peeks out the window briefly before pulling the curtains closed. The action throws swirls of dust into the air, and she waves a dismissive hand as she sits down on the bed and eyes him.

 

"Come in already," she says.

 

* * *

 

 

She asks because she wants to. Jiyong is the first person in months to look at her and know exactly how dangerous she is. His naked apprehension and wariness is a comfort; the way his body shies from crossing the invisible line is a flattering caution _._

 

Chaerin is tired from this new game; for as much as she won it, it has just as much exhausted her. She has wanted for months, waited for months, openly and honestly, and then buried all of herself into a beautiful and fragile shell. All-encompassing is her discomfort and hatred of pretending to be someone she never has been and has never wanted to be. She could run into waiting, expectant arms in an instant and destroy Jiyong from this ivory tower.

 

\- but all she wants is to be Chaerin again, and Chaerin is not someone to be rescued. She is something to be rescued from.

 

* * *

 

 

Jiyong resists the urge to squirm, because Chaerin looks at him and flays apart the lies he wears like a second skin with every blink, and the way he doesn't do anything to stop it - has never really stopped anything she does - makes him wonder if he's always been such a masochist or a fool. It's impossible for him to say what she wants that she doesn't already have, either of her own work or by robbing him. He's at his wits' end, taunted and bruised and humiliated, while she is clean of all fault to everyone's eyes but his. 

 

"Did you enjoy it?" he asks, because it's a simple question, and he thinks he already knows the answer. 

 

"Which part?" 

 

He scowls. 

 

At that, she smiles and that's the answer he thought he would get - but then her smile slips off her face, and he can hear the buzz of the hallway lights behind him. 

 

"Hardly worth it," she says, finally, and she eyes him with distaste. 

 

"If it's not worth it, then stop," Jiyong bristles, stepping into the room and closing the door behind him. "What are you getting out of it besides that?"

 

"The pleasure of your company," she drawls and pushes a dark strand of hair out of her eyes. "You don't believe me?"

 

"Should I ever?" he says, and even then he realizes that true is all she's ever been to him ( _Lee Chaerin,_ an easy introduction that he took for untested cockiness,  _who dresses for herself and no one else_ ), up until this month. He wonders at the change, at what brought it on, and then he catches sight of himself in the mirror, at the practiced tilt of his head, and the crooked slide of a smirk that he took from someone else's mouth. 

 

 _Ah,_ he realizes. 

 

"Yes," she says, firmly.

 

He flinches as she pushes herself off the bed; his hand goes up to his pocket, as she stops in front of him. Her eyes flicker down to where his fingers are grazing against the grip, and she  _laughs,_  bright and loud and unrestrained. She puts her hand over his and tugs it out until the gun is pointed into the narrow space between them, trained on the ceiling. She leans forward, up, and pushes her lips against his.

 

He almost doesn't hear the gun being cocked over the roaring in his ears and when he does, he pulls back, but she follows him and pushes her body against his until they hit the wall. Her hold on his hand and the gun is brutally strong, and when she kisses him again, he knows any bullet shot would skid up the line of her neck, punch through her chin, and burrow into his head.

 

 _The difference between falling in love and going to prison_ , his thoughts wildly conclude as the barrel quavers between them,  _is that you can escape from prison._

 

"Jiyong," she says into his mouth, the first person to call him that in years. He wonders if it's the last thing he's ever going to hear, before she continues. "Come downstairs with me."

 

"To the police," he accuses, chasing her lips and letting the barrel slide against his shirt and rest against his ribs. He can feel her smile against his jaw. 

 

"Eventually," she affirms and releases her hand, slides them both up his chest until they come to rest on either side of his neck. His frustration is a whetstone she wants to sharpen their future against. She runs her hand up through his hair, and his breath catches when her finger brushes against the scar there. There's new tension in the room, for her to find this, his body strung out like a cord waiting to snap as she traces the full length of it beneath the pad of her thumb. 

 

"They all think you're obsessed with me," she says when she reaches the end of the line and stills. Jiyong breathes again. The smile falls off her face, replaced by something offended. "They think I'm in danger."

 

He has to bark out a laugh at that, and she traces fingernails around the shell of his ears, having to smile again at someone understanding the absurdity.

 

"Not the police - not yet," she says, "There's someone else first. Okay?" 

* * *

Chaerin comes out of the elevator, and spies her drugstore cowboy, his head just poking out above the back of the chair. His fingers are drumming against the arm, and she would bet everything she had that he's debating whether or not to come knocking on her door and offer a bit of comfort. An acrid taste of loathing fills her throat as she slides back into the ill-fitting costume of distress and unease that made her so appealing. 

 

"Hey," she says, softly, coming around as he jerks up in his chair and stands up. She sits down across from him, leans across and takes his hands in hers as the pity in his eyes grows larger, louder, more suffocating. 

 

It abruptly disappears as Jiyong shoots him in the back of the head, the blood splattering onto him and Chaerin in equal measure. She stands up and yanks him across the back of the chair into a kiss.

 

"Okay," he says as they come apart.

 

"Okay," she says back and they walk out to the car together, hands clasped, as sirens begin to wail.

**Author's Note:**

> Le flic - police  
> Ceci est un vol - this is a robbery  
> C'est un sketch - just kidding
> 
> If my French is wrong, please let me know!


End file.
